MET Ernest Thompson Seton one day crossing Fifth Avenue. "How are you?" I asked.
"Oh, pretty well," he replied, "for a man who has been in New York for two months. How are you?"
"Oh, pretty well," said I, "for a man who has not been in New York for two months," and gaining the sidewalk in safety we parted, still friends.
It is all in the point of view. There is much to be said for his feeling in the matter. Indeed, I, for one, will gladly admit that entirely too much has been said, of late, about the "love of nature" and not enough about the love of cities. The cry of "Back to the farm!" reverberates from all strata of society. "The return to nature" is celebrated in hundreds of books. Dozens of magazines are devoted to every conceivable phase of country life from "Chickens I Have Chased and Cherished," to "How I Built My Formal Garden for Fourteen-Fifty," "Bungling the Bungalow," "Sleeping-Bags and How to Get Out of Them," and other fascinating advice in publications edited by city men in tall office buildings.
It is, of course, a wholesome movement—when it doesn't move too far. But we are running the country into the ground, as we do most of our enthusiasms in America. Even a love of nature can become an unnatural love. It is now a fashionable fad to manifest passionate interest in "The Flirtations of the Chippy-Bird," "The Domestic Worries of the Woodchuck," "The Characteristic Poses of the Screech-Owl," and "The Left-hind-foot Print of the Skunk"—to quote a few wild titles I have known.
So far as I can make out, it is right and proper to be keen about a city, provided it is built by the dear little beaver, but to be interested in one constructed by your own species indicates that you are a cockney with no soul for "the real things of life." To be of the elect you must look down on the sky-scraper and look up at the ant-hill. In short, love nature only so far as it does not include human nature.
Well, of course, every one has a right to his own tastes, and if you prefer the haunts and habits of birdies and bunnies to the haunts and habits of men and women, you can snub your own genus all you like and nobody will object. But why take on so about it? Some of these nature rhapsodists are as bad as the commuters who sleep out on the porch night and talk about it all day, or those all individuals who can't sleep well anywhere and then assume a virtuous air because they get up early—and arouse the whole household.
Cultivate intimacies with the cunning little squirrels on the tree-tops, if you enjoy it. Toady to the tree-toad, if you really like him. Call them all familiarly by their Latin names, if it makes you feel good; only don't look down on us humble members of your own family simply because we are not climbers too. It's so snobbish. Besides, it is a pity to make the nice, innocent tenderfoot discontented with his lot, city or suburban. I have been in the woods with nature-climbers. Most of them are as awkward and out of place there as a woodsman in a drawing-room.
The joke of it is that what most of us really like about "our furred and feathered friends" is their resemblance to ourselves. The beaver city, for example, or the subway of the field-mouse, is thrilling because it reminds us of similar goings-on of our own. The wild animals known by Ernest Thompson Seton and introduced by him to a large circle of admirers—including myself—have proved such universally acceptable acquaintances simply because they are just regular fellows. Whether true naturalists, like him, or near-naturalists, like his imitators, indignantly resent the imputation or not, the popular interest in nature is simply an interest in human nature after all! Such being the ease, why not go higher up and satisfy it at first hand?
Now, in sheer self-defense, lest I be cast out at this point as a human-nature fakir, I make haste to insert that I have no personal animus against "God's great outdoors." I am not in the least prejudiced against the furred and feathered crowd. I gladly agree that "nature is wonderful." I have frequently sat upon the hardest rocks in order to commune with her, and have been known to "look up at the stars" until I got a crick in my neck. I love the brooklets, I love the treelets, I love the flowerlets so long as I don't have to weed them, and I am extremely fond of birds, preferably ducks done not over eleven minutes. I shoot as many as luck and the law allow once or twice every fall.